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Underground > Comic Books >

Comics Questions for Non-Comics Readers.

  
 
moriarty
17:07 / 14.02.02
I'm not trying to criticize people who don't post here, or even those who don't read comics, by starting this thread. As someone with a great love of the medium, and who wants to make comics that branch out beyond the typical audience, I'd appreciate hearing from those who don't usually give comics much thought.

If you don't read comics, why not? A perception of the medium as juvenile? Not enough content that interests you? Possibly it's too hard to drudge through all the crap to get to the gold? Or are the places to buy comics so off-putting that you don't want to venture there? Or, maybe, you've never even given comics any consideration, at all.

And if you do read comics, what kind? Do you read newspaper strips but don't consider them to be "comics" as they are discussed in this forum? Are your interests being represented here?

In short, what could comics, and this forum, do to create an interest in the medium for you?
 
 
Persephone
17:24 / 14.02.02
I have read about three comic books in my life, in fact can probably list them for you:

1. an Underdog story
2. some sort of X-men thingy set on an Earth Two (from which I got a key piece of philosophy that's still in use today)
3. two Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle books, I guess you call 'em trades

I would be an avid comics reader still and now, only Dad did not allow them when I was a kid.

This forum has already done a lot to reawaken my interest in comics. That Clowes Eightball is on my list of books to buy, only that's a pretty long list what with the book club and a bunch of sci-fi recs I got, too.

The thing that is intimidating about comics to me is that I don't at all know where to start. Like, where can I pick up with the X-men? Just start with the most current issue and go, or is there some back reading that needs to be done?

Then also, I don't want to bring down the level of discussion by bringing my beginner's ass in... perhaps the comics pool could have a shallow end of sorts?

[ 14-02-2002: Message edited by: Persephone ]
 
 
Not Here Still
17:35 / 14.02.02
Nah, I know where you're coming from Persephone.

I wasn't into comics - they were kid's stuff, etc etc. Then, in Uni, someone lent me Sandman - and I was hooked.

I went through about five years of mid-heavy comic buying, but apart from one or two titles, (mainly Transmet, though I'm about four or five issues behind) it's all dropped off now. And that is due, a lot, to problems with things like continuity.

There are comics which I have found out I liked (such as Morrison's Marvelboy six issue thingy) a long time after they have been out already. There are others where I need four hard to find back issues to work out what is going on.

And don't even get me started on the idea of 'universes.'

Even in an interesting comic, I'm like 'who's the guy in the cape there? Why isn't he called what he used to be called? What is that creature doing in a comic about a hitman? etc etc, and I lose interest.

And looking for new comics in the one non-worrying shop round here, I have to agree that, sometimes, it's too hard to drudge through all the crap to get to the gold.

But I still love the medium, and yeah, I do sometimes wonder about non 'comic' comics - I was wondering about starting threads about Raymond Briggs, Steve Bell, Joe Sacco and so on and how they would be received. Guess I maybe should...

[edited for sense]

[ 14-02-2002: Message edited by: Not Me Again ]
 
 
w1rebaby
17:41 / 14.02.02
I read comics, I'm just not a "comics fan". I know bits about some and not a lot in general.

I read 2000AD pretty solidly as a child (my dad used to order it for me, so that he could read it himself). I read other things pretty much at random. A few graphic novels (Sandman, Preacher), a bit of manga (Shirow mostly, used to get Battle Angel Alita regularly), a bit of "odd stuff" (Clowes, Milk And Cheese, odd things picked up because they look interesting), some comics borrowed from friends.

I don't collect anything, I've never followed anything for very long and I don't have much of a knowledge of anything, apart from early 2000AD. Thus I never really get interested in discussing comics, because I don't have any point of comparison. I can't make any broad points.

Occasionally I might dip into this forum because I recognise a name, like it and want to see whether I can pick up anything else like that, but otherwise it's like me trying to discuss Elizabethan drama having only read a bit of Shakespeare.
 
 
pointless and uncalled for
17:48 / 14.02.02
I really love the "comic/graphic novel" format. there's something majical about the whole arrangement.

However, I have the problem whereby I don't have the dedication to buy on a monthly basis. The escalating costs of other dedications are proving prohibitive.

I actually prefer to read collectives rather than single issues, I prefer the one story in one book arrangement.

Stylewise my favourites include:

Groo
Sam & Twitch
Transmet
Blade of the Immortal
Early Ghost
HardBoiled
Plastic Forks

I'd like to have the time and facilities to write my own scripts and have an artist who understands me put them to paper.

There's no such thing as a perfect comic because as any dedicated reader knows, it could have been done better.
 
 
Matthew Fluxington
17:53 / 14.02.02
[QUOTE]Originally posted by Persephone:
That Clowes Eightball is on my list of books to buy, only that's a pretty long list what with the book club and a bunch of sci-fi recs I got, too.

the newest Eightball would be a great place to start - it's a brilliant self-contained issue, and it's cheap. I would also recommend picking up Clowes' Caricature and Ghost World books too, they're good starters...

Adrian Tomine's Optic Nerve comics are of very high quality too, and all of them are self-contained and inexpensive.


The thing that is intimidating about comics to me is that I don't at all know where to start. Like, where can I pick up with the X-men? Just start with the most current issue and go, or is there some back reading that needs to be done?


If you want to start with New X-Men (the one Grant does is New X-Men. it is unlikely you would have interest in the other X-Men comics), you can pick up the E Is For Extinction book which collects the first four issues of the series. (If you buy it at a store, it'll be about $15 or so, but you can get it for about $10 from Amazon.)

You need not read any other X-Men comics ever published before that to understand what is in that volume. The story that follows, Germ Free Generation will be published in book form in the near future, but you can actually skip that story altogether and go straight from E Is For Extinction to the newest issue which just came out yesterday very easily. Everything you would need to understand from the previous story is explained clearly and succinctly in the issue.

The other great X-comic we talk about is X-Force, and a book collecting the first 5 issues has been released, it's called X-Force: New Beginnings, and costs about the same as the X-Men book. The next volume will be out soon, collecting the next 4 issues... the most recent issue of the comic, which came out a week ago, is a stand alone story and is actually a pretty great intro to the series and its characters.

One confusing thing about New X-Men is that it started with issue 114, so the most recent issue is 122, which is the beginning of a new storyline which is the conclusion of all the storylines introduced since the beginning of Grant Morrison's run. Similarly, X-Force starts with 116, and its most recent issue is 124. 125 begins a brand new storyline...

Both series are written and put together in a way as to be as friendly to new readers as possible.

I really wish that I lived close enough to all of you that I could just borrow out a lot of my books to y'all, so you could try things without having to spend so much money on things you may not like...

[ 14-02-2002: Message edited by: Flux = Rad ]
 
 
Ierne
18:03 / 14.02.02
I feel similarly to WoI in regards to the cost of comic books being an obstacle to more frequent consumption of them. I have a difficult time paying almost three dollars for a comic book when I can get a used paperback for about the same price.

I used to read comics when I was much younger (mostly Sword & Sorcery, which my father was into), but the only one I really collected on my own was Vampirella (the original one from the 70's).
 
 
Ethan Hawke
18:25 / 14.02.02
I used to be a heavy comic consumer in the late 80s early 90s. Mostly Marvel X-centric stuff. I stopped reading when they started letting the whiny baby artists write the things instead of, you know, people who knew how to tell a story. I never got interested enough to go back, with the sole exception of Mr. Morrison's Invisibles, which I followed sporadically from beginning to end. I picked up the first issues of both New x-Men and FF but nothing grabbed my imagination, even though I'm intimately familiar with the characters from teenage Fatbeard-ism. Apart from an odd thing like "From Hell" or the Akira trade paperbacks (haven't bought these yet, but, as someone who collected the beautiful EPIC colorized version until they became unfindable in his area, I am ~dying~ to see how the comic ends)

Why don't I read comics now?

(A)Price is a big issue. a 22 page comic costs 3 bucks? That's ridiculous. For 15 minutes of reading time? The thing ~can't~ cost that much to produce. Who needs special heavy paper or die cut covers and shit? Print the thing on newsprint. The kids won't know the difference.

(B)Glut of product.At least, this was a factor in me giving up comics initially. There are too many companies, too many comics to choose from.

(C) Constant revamps/relaunches. Also known as "Kill robin" syndrome. manufactured events to drive up sales.

(d) company wide crossovers. Horrible, horrible marketing ploy. Someone remind me what the point of these is.

(e) Most of these criticisms have been of mainstream comics. Well, most "indie" comics have left me cold with their amateur insularity and infrequent publication schedules.

If there's something out there that interests me, I'm more inclined to buy trade paperbacks (like From Hell, which had the great annotations) then try to scoot down to the neighborhood comic shop (which has more action figures than comics anyway).

As for comic shops, they suck these days, and the industry killed them. Too much product means they had to carry too much new inventory, making little room for back issues and old inventory, which was the cool part of being a comic reader (like a record collector) anyway. Who, as a comics fan, doesn't love diggin' through long boxes to find a rare treasure? The industry killed that pleasure.
 
 
deja_vroom
19:59 / 14.02.02
I love comics. I've read them all through my childhood, everything from Marvel and DC that I could get my hands on. All the super-hero stuff, I was there for it.

At an early age I was exposed to some material from a now defunct underground comic magazine called "ANIMAL", which had comics from great European artists. Ranxerox blew my head off (I was only 14!), just like the works of Moebius, Enki Bilal, Manara and others. So I started looking more for that kind of (admittedly) pseudo-philosophical stuff - there were also the collected strips from Calvin and Hobbes, Corto Maltese, Mafalda by Quino (great political commentary and loads of attitude)...

I might have gotten grumpy, whatever, but when I returned to take a look at what was going on with the super-people I was disgusted. The art was awful. I couldn`t understand what was going on on the panels, everything was too dark and too cluttered with unnecessary shit. When I quit reading super-hero books they were printed in 4-colors (stop laughing), but when I returned the colorists were just discovering the wonders of Photoshop. It looked awful, and it would look awful for a long time yet. Everybody had little pocket/bags around their thigs. What the hell do they put in that bags, anyway? Everybody had their muscles flexed all the time. All the artists wanted to be Jim Lee, and then that Rob Liefeld fella... So you might say that the first thing that made me quit mainstream super-hero comics was plain bad art. Sorry, *goddam awful* art.
Nowadays of course things look a little better than they were during that particular phase of Macfarlanism (who once said to Will Eisner: "I'm not interested in stories, I'm only interested in the visuals!")

Second thing to put me off: lack of respect for the reader. The "Robin routine"... "Yeah, this character died, but we brought hir back, now s/he discovered that s/he is a thousand year old demon from the fifth dimension with pyrokinetic powers. Actually, a clone of a thousand year demon". Yeah right...

I have this friend who still buys stuff from DC. So once and a while I talk to him, we start discussing comics etc... he loves to talk with me, just to see the look on my face when he tells me stuff like: "You know, Hal Jordan died" and I go "what??". And he: "Nah, it's okay, he resurrected, now he's some sort of [whatever he is now, I don't remember] from the fifth dimension. Well, actually, he's just its clone, but..."

I wish I had a steady diet of comics, but the european albums are too expensive, and very rarely we get anything published that isn't from Marvel/DC universes.
This is starting to change, since a lot of small labels are putting out new (at least to us stranded in Brazil) stuff. They have been promising Tom Strong, Top Ten, The Authority (which I just bought and got utterly disappointed with), Planetary... so let's see. These days the only book I'm buying is Promethea, which is expensive as hell, but is worth each cent.
 
 
Persephone
20:02 / 14.02.02
Thanks, Flux... soooo, I go into the comic shop and I ask for "Eightball 22" and "E is for Extinction" and I will sound like I know what I'm talking about?

Another thought, I really love the covers and cartoons in the New Yorker. I've really learned a lot about reading pictures vs. words from those... does that fit into this forum? What about Lynda Barry (sorry Flux) and the like?
 
 
Trijhaos
20:12 / 14.02.02
I don't think of myself as a "comics fan" exactly. I can't tell you about every incarnation of Superman, or Robin the Boy Wonder. I've read comics for as long as I can remember. It started with Ninja Turtles, G.I. Joe, and Transformers. Now I read the x-books (every damn one of them) , some of the stuff put out by Chaos Comics, and sometimes I'll pick up some book I've never heard of because it had a nice shiny cover. Unfortunately, no comic book will ever be able to compare to the godlike qualities of Calvin and Hobbes. Damn You Bill Waterson!! I miss Calvin and Hobbes. *sniff*
 
 
Matthew Fluxington
20:21 / 14.02.02
[QUOTE]Originally posted by Persephone:
Thanks, Flux... soooo, I go into the comic shop and I ask for "Eightball 22" and "E is for Extinction" and I will sound like I know what I'm talking about?

yeah, they shouldn't be too confused. it may help to clarify that E Is For Extinction is a New X-Men comic. Any respectable comic shop will have both in stock - do you have a Virgin megastore near you? I've found them to be excellent places to buy comics, they cater to people exactly like *you* and they are the future of comics retail as far as I'm concerned.

Another thought, I really love the covers and cartoons in the New Yorker. I've really learned a lot about reading pictures vs. words from those...

A great many of the illustrations and covers for The New Yorker are done by Art Spiegelman, who has done some very noteworthy comics, including Maus, which won the Pulitzer. With his wife Francis Mouly, who is the art editor of The New Yorker, they have put out two volumes of a book containing comics for children by some of the best cartoonists currently living (Clowes, Chris Ware, Charles Burns, Joost Swarte, etc etc) called Little Lit. It's put out by Harper Collins, and you should be able to find it in any book story carrying children's books. It's really cool, especially if you have children. (I don't, but I still like it)

Persephone, I think you should maybe consider checking out Chris Ware's work - his Jimmy Corrigan book was put out last year by Pantheon, and deserves all of the hype and praise that it gets, even though it's so miserable and upsetting that it's hard to read in one sitting.

I think you might also be interested in checking Phoebe Gloeckner's A Child's Life(which I discuss and have links for in another thread in this forum), and maybe Jessica Abel too - her La Perdida is really fantastic, and so far only the first volume (which may as well be a selfcontained story) has been released, and it's $5 for a very dense story of about 50 or so pages. It's worth it. A lot of Abel's other work is good, but pretty mundane and soap opera-ish - it's solid, but nothing special.

[ 14-02-2002: Message edited by: Flux = Rad ]
 
 
Margin Walker
09:27 / 15.02.02
quote:Originally posted by Persephone:
The thing that is intimidating about comics to me is that I don't at all know where to start.

Well, you can start by swingin' by Quimby's. Chris Ware did the streetsign & web art and the place just rocks. Everything from Optic Nerve posters to Chick tracts to weird hand-made zines. Plus, they have in-store appearances on a pretty regular basis.

As for me, here's my list of the comics I read:

Optic Nerve
Blue Monday
Hopeless Savages
Bone
Preacher
The Invisibles
Blade of the Immortal
Anything by Larry Gonick
V is for Vendetta
Maus
Anything by Ted Rall
Anything by Tony Millionaire
 
 
moriarty
09:27 / 15.02.02
Just to let you all know, I've started a Recommended Reading thread so that we can use this space to get some insight as to what might be wrong with comics, and this forum, and what can be done about it.

Nice picks so far, by the way! I'm all about Raymond Briggs, Groo, and Corto Maltese.
 
 
higuita
09:27 / 15.02.02
Is Groo still going? I used to skive school to go to the only cornershop I knew that sold it.
Mulch?

As for the amin point, I used to read tons of comics. Started with Spidey, old Xmen re-releases and a host of Marvel (including PowerPack, for some reason) and bought 2000AD solidly, right through uni [my mom would hoard all the issues and then I'd have a big wade through them every holiday].

Then it all got a bit, well, dull.
They killed every character I liked off [johnny alpha, fer chrissakes] and brought them back, and started with some really tossy stuff. What was wrong with a solid diet of Dredd, Slaine, Sam Slade, Ace Garp and Bad Company? I realise I've mixed up my timings there, and no doubt there was some dross padding out the VCs editions, but I just lost interest.

Another thing that killed it was the crossovers - Judge Dredd & Batman - yawn.

The stuff I bought got indulgent and frankly, no fun. The more serious stuff I read [watchmen et al] was good reading, but I found that I preferred books.

No doubt I would enjoy a lot of the stuff that's being recommended, and would sit and read quite happily, but comics stopped being something I buy, for some reason. The price, as mentioned above, is a fair point.

If I've got a few quid spare, I'll buy a second hand book, which will depreciate in value. If I want to pick up some of the old titles I enjoyed from a comic shop, they cost an f'ing fortune.
 
 
Bear
09:27 / 15.02.02
I used to ready the Beano and Oor Willie and The Broons - guess that counts...

then in my early teens I read 2000AD which I really enojoyed...

I've read most of the invisibles but not the last part but I will..

I don't buy comics because well I just dont think it would be worth it, I'd end up missing issue, loose the thread etc..I'm guesing you can have them delivered?

I'd really like to get into the X-men but I see you guys talking about it and I think I've missed too much, like walking into a movie half way ....
 
 
bio k9
09:27 / 15.02.02
As for comic shops, they suck these days, and the industry killed them. Too much product means they had to carry too much new inventory, making little room for back issues and old inventory, which was the cool part of being a comic reader (like a record collector) anyway. Who, as a comics fan, doesn't love diggin' through long boxes to find a rare treasure? The industry killed that pleasure.

You live in NY and can't find a good comic shop? You aren't trying. Flux, help a brother out. In Seattle you can't throw a rock without breaking a comic shop window, can NY really be that bad?

Also, Epic did finally get around to finishing the color Akira series. If you only need a couple of issues you should take a look around ebay before you buy the Dark Horse stuff.

Since none of you live around here I can reveal my secret to cheap comics... the used book store. <Gasp!> No, really, its true. The Half Price Books (I think its a national chain) store here has a huge selection of graphic novels and bins full of ratty old back issues (including a big run of Shade*) and their stock is constantly changing. I'm under the suspicion that two guys are secretly trading comics through the store and I just happen to snatch some of the good stuff from them every once n a while. Hell, borders has comics and chairs. Sit down with some hot chocolate and read some of theirs sometime.

.
.
*I know its been discussed in another thread but, which issues should I buy?
 
 
Matthew Fluxington
11:44 / 15.02.02
Bear: If you follow the advice I gave to Persephone about New X-Men, and get the E Is For Extinction book, and the newest issue, you'll be cool. It would take maybe an hour or two to read, and you won't even have to wait long obnoxious gaps between chapters like we had to - of course, if you get hooked, you'll have to get used to month+ gaps between issues with big cliffhangers!

You live in NY and can't find a good comic shop? You aren't trying. Flux, help a brother out. In Seattle you can't throw a rock without breaking a comic shop window, can NY really be that bad?


Well, to be fair to Todd, I've been in maybe about 20+ different shops throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn over the past year or so, and even for the best of the bunch, I think Todd's complaints are pretty justified. This ain't the west coast, man - none of the shops here are so amazingly hipster-oriented. The rents are so high that folks would never survive doing a Berkeley-style shop.

My personal favorite shop is the Forbidden Planet in Union Square, and I'm sure he's been there. It's no utopia, but it does a good job of trying to appeal to the largest and most varied potential audience..
 
 
bio k9
16:47 / 15.02.02
Wow, that sucks. I haven't been back since 90 or so (I was 15 or 16) but I remember the shops being much cooler than the ones here. Maybe they were back then. Or maybe I just liked them because they were different.
 
 
Matthew Fluxington
17:06 / 15.02.02
Maybe the NYC stores are still cooler than the Washington stores, and Todd and I just have impossible standards.

Well, like I said, there's soooooooo many shops - I can't imagine any other place in the world having nearly this many comic shops. Some are truly awful, and some are really cool. It depends on what yr going for - I would say to Todd, who complains about bad back issue bins, he should check out Midtown Comics on 41st and 7th Ave. That's a pretty good shop, I think. Very organized, great back issues, a huge stock of graphic novels and collections, PLUS one of the best selections of bootleg videos of old tv shows that you're going to find anywhere in the world.
 
 
bastl b
23:42 / 15.02.02
I really love comics, so much that I think it would be awesome to get a job at a decent publisher. reasoning: If I HAVE to work then it should be for the promotion of a product I consider worth investing much time and energy into. So I´m not your non-comics reader but I´m interested in the attitude towards my favouite medium which is held by the rest of the world.

people see comics as either funny things (when they like them) or as degenerate trashy shit for kids who would be better off reading a book but they prefer comics because they don´t take any effort to read which proves that they´re shit(when they don´t like them). but comics are hardly seen as a medium they are more like a genre in the mind of the general public (superheroes or funny animals, and the term comic-book movie says it all)

the only hope for the industry is to cater to a young and urban, (pseudo)intellectual audience like students and so on who are interested in unusual and edgy stuff.

the problems: the dominance of the superhero genre which isn´t a mainstream in the eyes of the general public. all the things mentioned: no marketing or horrible marketing, godawful art and story telling abilities, the ridicilous price, back continuities that are like a deadweight on the chest of a good stroy and make the superhero stories unreadable for anyone but longtime readers.

the shitty state of comic shops, the downright ugliness of most comic covers (no design sense), the price, the price, the price, plus the idiotic serial pamphlet format.

I´d suggest to look out for the "indy", "alternative" sectors (fantagraphics, topshelf, and others are quality publishers).

Most importantly I would advise anyone to just NOT buy single issues and just wait for collections, original graphic novels. If you want to read a comic buy a format which has self-contained stories. That way you save yourself a lot of trouble. the inidividual issues make for crappy formulaic 24page dictated storytelling and if you miss an issue that´s a pain in the ass (have one story which I can´t fuking read because the publisher only has one single desk copy left of the issue I´m missing out of a five issue maxiseries). the pamphlet format, by and large, is for addicted retards, plus the ads are horrible too.

the industry of comics is total shit, we need to have a mainstream people accept like solid fantasy and decent teenage romance comics. vertigo and some self-publishers are going the right direction. bit of a problem is that on one side you have superheroes that are for the most part pretty bad (due to their insular nature and editors who try to be trendy but just don´t understand their product) and on the other hand there are very arty serious comics like JIMMY CORRIGAN and FROM HELL which are a far cry from the expectations of the general public (no possiblities of escapism there and quick reading on the toilet won´t make you appreciate these works either). often these works which i consider to be masterpieces and I´m overjoyed that are others out there (LOVE AND ROCKETS, SAFE AREA GORAZDE, IT`S A GOOD LIFE IF YOU DON`T WEAKEN, STUCK RUBBER BABY) are not easy to read especially for new readers. we need a real mainstream somewhere between suerheroes and the cutting edge stuff that gives people what they want (at a reasonable price and in an attractive format)if we want to attract new readers.

the comics medium itself is as wonderful and lovely as it ever was.
 
 
Persephone
00:34 / 16.02.02
quote:Originally posted by Margin Walker:

Well, you can start by swingin' by Quimby's.


I went! Quimby's is right down the street from my house. Just sort got my feet wet... so much to look at; but I shall make it a regular stop from now on.
 
 
Margin Walker
01:02 / 16.02.02
I went! Quimby's is right down the street from my house.

Grrrr...

Which is masculine shorthand for "By and by, did I happen to mention that I envy you to no end? Did I?"

At least, I now have the justified hubris to utter these words:

"toooooolld yooooooou....

and, for the denoument, "Nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyaaaaah"

OK, enough of my off-topic & sophmoric shots. Welcome to the fold. Hey, wanna pommegranite? [/LIST]
 
 
_pin
07:08 / 19.02.02
I don't read them much, becuase they cost too much, I'm a lazy sod at ordering things and the local bookshop has a piss-poor selection (tho, bizarrely, better then most other bookshops I've seen- dirth of actualy comic shops, per chance? I'm thinking so)
 
 
rizla mission
11:13 / 20.02.02
quote:Originally posted by bastl b:

the only hope for the industry is to cater to a young and urban, (pseudo)intellectual audience like students and so on who are interested in unusual and edgy stuff.


you called?
 
  
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